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Hello 2013!

Its a brand mew year here at Poetry Paradise. To get the year off to a great start I bring you the talent in the form of...

Gary Soto

Raised in California by his poor, immigrant mother, Soto is able to draw on his life of hardship and the lives of others to create poems that both accurately and beautifully reflect the lives of the Mexican-American community.


The book of poetry I am featuring here today is one that touches on the most illusive, intense and shimmering of loves. First love.
　
About his work Joyce Carol Oates
noted "Gary Soto's poems are fast, funny, heartening, and achingly believable, like Polaroid love letters, or snatches of music heard out of a passing car; patches of beauty like patches of sunlight; the very pulse of a life 　

Here is a sample of his highly visual way with words:

COMPOSITION

　
Cold days, cold without you
Ice hanging from the eaves like teeth
And the sun riding out of town before I changed
Out of my pajamas. To get warm, I opened a can
Of alphabet soup, got it boiling,
And poured it into a bowl. The bowl was warm
As your hand. I liked that, steam curling
As I carefully carried it to the table,
I drank from the lip of the bowl,
And used a chopstick to form I love you
From the tangle of floating letters.
I drank that sentence and began to glow.




　
Born in Fresno, California to Mexican American parents, Gary Soto learned the hard work ethic through his share of chores, including mowing lawns, picking grapes, painting house numbers on street curbs, and washing cars. His hard work paid off at California State University at Fresno, from which he graduated with an English degree, and later at the University of California at Irvine, where he earned a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.Gary Soto is an acclaimed poet, essayist, and fiction writer.

To visit his website and read more you can go here

http://www.garysoto.com

And I will see YOU back here in two weeks. Go out and make 2013 your best year yet!

Indie